It should always be a goal to drive attendee registration to your events and conferences, but what good does that do if attendees are simply going through the motions? We’ve all been to a conference that imitated a zombie apocalypse: attendees break out to multiple educational sessions where eventually the lectures lead to daydreams and doodling, and maybe even aimlessly wander a trade show where they pass out business cards in exchange for the coolest swag. What are attendees truly gaining from this?

In order to create a fulfilling experience for your attendees, it’s essential to provide attendees with an interactive mobile event app.

Check out these four ways to turn an attendee “going through the motions” into an active and engaged participant:

1. Don’t Ignore Social Outlets

Social media is here to stay and there is nowhere better to have access to all of your social forums than in your mobile event app. Use pre-set Twitter hashtags to reflect the name of your event and keep the conversation flowing by replying to attendees who use the hashtag. Encourage attendees to share photo memories by promoting photo sharing – where they can “like” and comment on other user photographs.

Keep your social media presence strong before, during, and after your event and your attendees will be sure to participate in the fun!

2. Encourage Participation from Speakers and Exhibitors

Attendees will struggle to become participants without your speakers and exhibitors on board. Be sure your speakers and exhibitors are aware prior to the conference of how they can engage and interact with attendees through the event app. Have your speakers engage with attendees during their sessions by utilizing live polling and sharing the results in real time – this is share to strike up a conversation. Attendees will be sure to have questions or comments at the end of a session. Rather than awkwardly passing around a microphone and putting the spotlight on one attendee at a time, inform them they can ask questions straight from the event app, which the speaker can then answer based on the question ranking.

As for your exhibitors, encourage them to promote appointment scheduling in order to develop one-on-one relationships with attendees. With these guys on board, you will be sure to create a more interactive experience for your attendees.

3. Promote Attendee to Attendee Interaction

Conferences are often focused on the attendee to exhibitor/speaker/sponsor relationship. By creating relationships with other attendees, they will be more likely to strike up conversation about the conference and create excitement amongst each other. Be sure to promote the messaging function in your event app where the users can converse with one another. Whether they are making plans, sharing feedback on a session or simply catching up, they are creating relationships built upon your event!

4. Let Them Know Their Voice Matters

There is no better definition of a participant than an attendee sharing their feedback which single-handedly benefits the course of the conference (or next years, for that matter). Send push notifications to your attendees to encourage them to take the mobile survey you’ve created within the app. Help them understand just how valuable their feedback is to help your conference grow and improve. Once they see their feedback put into action, whether it be a suggestion that was accepted with open arms or simply words of praise, they will know for sure their impact was made.

Providing attendees with an event app and understanding the best practices for using one is the key to creating a more interactive experience at your conference. With the proper marketing and promotion all of these things can be achieved to transform your attendees to actively engaged participants! For more information regarding the benefit of event apps please visit www.eventpedia.com.